


Squeeze

by leiascully



Series: The FBI's Most Unwanted [3]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Brooding, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-02
Updated: 2015-06-02
Packaged: 2018-04-02 13:33:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4061890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully didn't read him as a cautionary tale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Squeeze

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: 1.02 "Squeeze"  
> A/N: I kept getting distracted by how gorgeous the remastered episodes are. +10 to brooding. +100 to Scully's perfection.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this and no infringement is intended.

Dana Scully, human credential. He held her in front of him like his badge. Scully - neat, professional, respectable - got him into places. People liked her. Mulder understood that. She was small, didn't loom over anybody the way he did, and they mistook her measured thought for deference. He didn't understand why they didn't see she was as compact and business-like as his sidearm. They had sent him a weapon and she had taken the matter into her own hands. She would not be wielded or manipulated. 

He was vaguely aware that she was ambitious. She had dreams and aspirations and benchmarks of success. He remembered the highs of his own golden days: slaps on the back from his fellow agents, firm handshakes from his superiors. He had had Diana by his side then, had woken up with the tumble of her hair in his mouth and brushed her shoulder surreptitiously in the corridors. And then he had discovered the X-Files, fallen down the rabbit hole like Alice, and discovered a warren of dark deeds and inexplicable mysteries, and now the light hurt his eyes. They had put a spotlight in place of the sun, hot and wrong, the brilliance intended to obfuscate, but there was Scully haloed like a saint, gazing steadily at him and offering him a hand up out of the hole he'd dug himself into. 

The other agents saw only gawky, crazy Mulder, the epitome of all they sought to avoid, dragging down one of their own. They liked Scully, or at least, liked what they could see of her, heedless of the depth of her. They invited her to work with them, as if the Bureau were a junior high microcosm of an adult world. Mulder, disgusted, played the fool. She slid her hand gently up his arm, gentling him with her touch. He was a rogue agent in their eyes. Scully was what kept him from lunging, fractious and unbalanced. He took pleasure in encouraging the perception, though it left a sour taste in his mouth like a hangover.

"They want me?" he asked, hands on his hips, parroting her skepticism as they made their way away from the crime scene.

She ducked her head. "They won't say it that way, Mulder, but they want you."

"They're using you, Scully," he said. 

"They're using _us_ , Mulder," she reminded him. "Colton will owe us one." 

"You never answered my question," he said. She raised one eyebrow, a perfectly calibrated gesture. "Do you think I'm spooky?"

Her lips quirked. She ducked under his arm as he held the door for her. "You didn't have to bait him like that."

"Colton doesn't take my work seriously," Mulder told her.

"He may not take our process seriously, but he'll respect our results," Scully said.

"I wish that mattered," Mulder said.

"Of course it matters," Scully told him. "The truth will always matter. If we bring a killer to justice, it doesn't matter what Colton thinks about you. I'm certain that's what he wants too."

Mulder shrugged, inarticulate. He didn't want her certainty extinguished. 

\+ + + +

She was not the willing ally that Diana was, who had followed him unquestioning on every intuitive leap. He had to prove himself to Scully, lay out the evidence step by step like one of those charts that would teach you to waltz, if you could only move your feet in the right sequence. Her faith in the process was unshakeable. He shook his head and quietly mourned the day that faith would die. Whatever else happened, she was good at her work. Her hands were steady around her weapon as Tooms rattled down the duct. She never flinched.

He watched her around the other agents. She smiled more easily, but it never reached the depths of her eyes. She had put up a cordon around herself. He wondered that the others couldn't see it. They treated her too casually, misinterpreting her, imagining they could take advantage of her kindness, oblivious to the way that Scully could assess a situation to a tolerance of microns. Scully with her scales of Justice, unblinded. 

He couldn't say what alchemy had happened in Oregon: Scully trembling in his arms, Scully listening to him in the dark, Scully soaked by rain and laughing. It had forged some bond between them; he could feel the solidity of it, a bridge suspended over disbelief that swayed but would not give. They had lost nine minutes and gained something that could not be quantified. 

Scully didn't read him as a cautionary tale. She listened, sitting next to him, bracing him with her shoulder against his as if they held each other up, point and counterpoint, their minds cantilevered in an odd balance. She liked evidence she could set her back against, but he knew she would fight their corner until she dropped. She took him at his word and followed him into the dark. He was slowly beginning to realize how grateful he should be when he found her necklace in the cache of Tooms' treasures, a junk sale jumble of memento moris and the glint of gold.

The dark had followed her home. He sped through the streets, trying to outrun it, a half-whispered hope on his lips. Kicking down her door was not the way he'd wanted to enter her home, but he and Scully had skipped past any normal stages of get-to-know-you. Mulder crashed through her living room, reeled on by terror of losing her, dizzy with old fears and hazy helpless memories. He remembered she was small when he saw her stretched out on the tile, fighting for her life and her liver, but all she needed was space enough to breathe and she could save herself. He'd never doubted it. She handcuffed Tooms to the taps of her bath and put herself back together as Mulder watched Tooms watch her, yellow eyes baleful. 

\+ + + + 

"It's over, Mulder," she said as they walked away from the cell.

"Is it?" he asked. 

"I feel satisfied with our work," she told him. "Don't you?"

"The work isn't over, Scully," he said.

She shook her head. "Come on," she said. "I'll buy you a drink. It's the least I can do. You might have saved my liver."

"I don't think we should keep score," he joked, holding the door. "I don't like my odds."

She smiled at the floor and her shoulder brushed his arm as they walked out into the daylight.


End file.
